Dear Computer Lady,

I hope you can HELP ME!

 I have WinME. My Free AVG 7 stopped supporting WinME on April 30. And I can’t upgrade because of O.S. Is there a GOOD & Free online Antivirus program that will support this O.S.??

 We absolutely cannot afford to upgrade our computer. I am unemployed now and husband is looking at a possible job loss!

 Thank you for all you do. I have received your newsletters since getting this computer 8 yrs ago !

Alice

Dear Alice,

I can understand your dilemma, and I can understand the position of the software companies. Since the average life of a computer is 5 years, and after 10 years there are not many computers still running operating systems that old, software companies  do not find it cost effective to devote programming and testing to such a small percentage of the market.

Because the average person replaces their computer every 5 years, there are probably lots of people around you with an “old” computer that is actually newer than your computer that they don’t know what to do with. If you spend some time looking around, you can probably find a nice little computer that is running Windows XP. Look on places like www.craigslist.org  and www.freecycle.org 

I just did a quick search for free computers at craigslist and found several free computers in my area.

In the meantime, I was able to find you a solution that will work until the end of this year.  Avast Antivirus at www.avast.com still has a free version that will support Windows ME until the end of 2009.

There is also a free antivirus program called, ClamWin antivirus that works with Windows ME, at http://www.clamwin.com  but you must run scans with this program, it does not include a real-time scanner.

I hope this helps.

Elizabeth